It’s not landing on ice in a helicopter next to a sedated polar bear that worries Merav Ben-David, it’s getting stuck there.

In more than a decade of studying polar bears in the world’s farthest reaches, she’s never had to spend a night on the ice. She hopes she never will.

As her career progresses, the University of Wyoming wildlife ecology professor still goes out on the ice. But, she is also working with the public.

“I can come up with the best data and interpretation of the data, but then what? It’s just me and my colleagues and if we just look at each other around the room we won’t be able to do anything,” she said. “I don’t think we can change anything without everyone pitching in.”

That’s her mission with the Citizen Science Project by Polar Bear International based out of Churchill, Manitoba. The project started in 2011 and she joined in the spring. The first group of citizen scientists returned in late November.

The Churchhill polar bear population is one of the world’s most southern populations and will feel the impact of global warming first. The Citizen Science Project recruits students to take tourists out onto the tundra in buggies where they collect data on bears.

“It allows the students to learn how to interact with the public. There are a lot of wildlife management issues where you deal with the public,” she said. “And hopefully the citizens will be engaged and participate and we will get good, important information on the bears.”

Work with the polar bear project and other research with Ben-David helped inspire University of Wyoming student Sarah Heath to make a career out of educating the public.

Heath went on the Churchill trip this year and has known and worked with Ben-David since she started at UW.

“Your initial impression of Merav as a student is that she is intimidating,” Heath said. “I mean, this is a woman who darts polar bears out of helicopters.”

Ben-David started working with polar bears while she finished her Ph.D. at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996. She had also studied otters in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

In 2000, she moved to Laramie and continued her polar bear work along with more regional research. In that time she’s handled polar bear cubs, flown helicopters into the most remote regions of the Arctic and spent 36 days on an ice-breaking ship capturing polar bears from Ringle Island, Russia to Banks Island in Canada.

On that trip she watched a polar bear mother lose a cub in a storm.

“They end up swimming a lot because the ice isn’t good anymore,” she said. “Storms break up the ice and little cubs can get crushed.”

It is the sad part of her research, knowing this is their future, Ben-David said.

Her studies aren’t limited to polar bears and in the past decade she’s added other projects dealing with the effects of climate change and development. She spends two and a half to three months in the field every summer, floating rivers, trapping mammals and flying small planes.